Diane Gorvin – Public Artist

“It was over thirty years ago, I was at art college and we were given a project to design a relief sculpture for a bank and I thought I’d base it on the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra as I’d get lots of drawing practice and I could make something interesting based on them. I was attending many of their rehearsals and sometimes they’d have a concert pianist there. The soloists were always the most interesting and exciting people to draw and inevitably I ended up drawing a few pianists during these rehearsals.

When someone is a soloist they have such a passion for the music that they move in an intense and interesting way, it’s very hard to capture. I like the challenge of it. Drawing a pianist is very difficult. The piano is such a complex, architectural form that it’s very difficult to draw so if I knew I was going to be around a lot, then I could invest a lot of time in drawing the actual instrument.

I went on tour with the orchestra to Hong Kong and Peter Frankl was in that series of concerts and I was with them for the whole three weeks. I think that my Peter Frankl work was the best of series of drawings that I did for this project because I had time to invest in drawing the piano and then I could set him against the piano, and try to capture his stance and movement.

http://www.bewsgorvin.co.uk/Phil Bews and Diane Gorvin are a partnership that makes sculpture for the public realm, collaborating on a wide range of public art projects, internationally and throughout the UK. Experienced in li

aising with architects, landscape architects, structural engineers and fabricators, they have designed, made and installed over a hundred site specific, sculptural works in a wide variety of environments in both urban and rural contexts, many were commissioned from ‘percent for art’ policies.